Development of Urban Mines as Urban Resource Recovery Centers to Utilize Solid Waste and Create a Holonic Path for a Sustainable Society

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Industrial systems and daily life in Japan are shifting to become recycling-based to reduce energy and resource consumption. To establish a society based on recycling, urban resource recovery centers (urban mines) are important as places to reduce waste volumes, reusing and recycling valuable materials with application of mineral processing technology. The authors have studied advanced mineral processing technology for urban mines, and have developed new processes as described below. Based on these results, the creation of a holonic path in a sustainable society is discussed and proposed.1) A process for recycling of plastics and metals from scrapped copy machines was developed and a processing Pilot plant was constructed around the RETAC jig developed in our laboratory.2) A process for recovering fine and high quality glass from waste fluorescent lamps was developed using RETAC jig.3) A hybrid jig using the differences in specific gravity and surface affinity for water was developed for separating plastics with the same specific gravities.4) A metal recovery process for incinerated municipal solid waste was developed using leaching and cementation-in-pulp methods.5) A process for recovering electrode materials from waste nickel metal hydride batteries was developed using selective crushing at low temperature and with 3 stages magnetic separation.6) A microencapsulation method to remediate soils contaminated with heavy metals was developed.7) A process to recover heavy metals and to remediate soils contaminated with heavy metals was developed using a hybrid method combined with leaching, cementation and magnetic separation.8) Sustainable societal systems linked with urban mines are discussed and proposed.